If David Barash, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Washington, has his way, chimeras will soon be a reality.” No restrictions exist in federal law that can stop the experiments and Barash argues at Nautilus: “I propose that generating humanzees or chimphumans would be not only ethical, but profoundly so, even if there were no prospects of enhancing human welfare. How could even the most determinedly homo-centric, animal-denigrating religious fundamentalist maintain that God created us in his image and that we and we alone harbor a spark of the divine, distinct from all other life forms, once confronted with living beings that are indisputably intermediate between human and non-human…

Human-animal chimeras are taking over the barnyard. A year after a research team announced they had created the first animal-human chimera by way of pig embryos containing human cells, they’ve done it again, the Guardian reports. This time it’s sheep embryos with human cells. The goal is to improve the availability and success rates of organ transplants by growing human organs inside animals. “Even today the best matched organs, except if they come from identical twins, don’t last very long because with time the immune system continuously is attacking them,” Dr. Pablo Ross says. According to the Telegraph, Ross’ team grew the embryos inside a sheep for three weeks. He says sheep have a number of advantages over pigs, including that their embryos are easier to produce via IVF.

In theory, the process could involve “interspecies blastocyst complementation” — the same technique researchers are exploring to create pigs capable of generating human organs for transplant. A blastocyst — an early embryo — is taken from an animal and genes crucial for the development of a particular cell line or organ edited out. “In this case you would aim at the reproductive system,” Palacios-González said in an interview. Next, human pluripotent stem cells (cells that have the potential to develop into any type of tissue in the body) taken from a donor’s skin are injected into the blastocyst to “compensate for the existing niche,” he said. “In this case human stem cells would complete the reproductive system, which would then create gametes.”

Most people would object, Greely said, to a pig with a human brain, a pig with human cells that can reproduce, or a pig with a human nose. “The big issue is this question of humanness and if we are conferring humanness on nonhumans,” he said. “That is going to make people upset.” Izpisua Belmonte said he wants more than anyone to see clear guidelines. He understands the importance of what the new technologies, many of them from his lab, portend. “We’re in a critical moment in human evolution. Everything that has happened in the past billion years follows two rules: random mutation and natural selection,” he said. “We’re now at a moment in history where we don’t have to follow Darwin’s rules. We need to be conscious of that.”

The Superman movement argues vociferously for the abolition of laws, mostly passed when human genetic modification was first permitted, which forbid the modification of a genome to create a being who does not inhabit human “G-space”. The movement’s members want to be able to create people who could not, even in principle, have come about as a combination of known, natural human genetic sequences. They believe computer modelling is now so good that the consequences of DNA changes outside G-space can be predicted, and that the risk of “inhuman” monsters can thus be obviated. No jurisdiction yet permits this. But, given the simplicity, these days, of editing DNA, it is hard to believe there is not, somewhere in the world, just such a being preparing to celebrate its own second C-day.

The headline-making births last November of the world’s first gene-edited babies (twin girls) was unsurprising in one way: The scientist involved was from China. As part of its effort to dominate scientific spheres including biotechnology, China has taken the lead in testing uses of Crispr, a tool newly available to researchers enabling them to alter DNA codes simply and inexpensively. Chinese scientists were the first to test Crispr in monkey embryos, in non-viable human embryos, in adult humans, and now in creating designer babies…